Your tax dollars at work, ladies and germs: The House Judiciary Committee, chaired by the Honorable and tech-challenged Bob Goodlatte (R-Va.) has published a bold, gif-filled "argument" against Emperor Obama's unilateral and unconditional surrender of the nation's borders to all the Mexican rapists and drug mules. For real.
Titled "At The Flick of a Switch," the web page begins with six irregularly sized images of a light switch before intoning
1. Right now, one single person – the President of the United States – can turn off the enforcement of our immigration laws unilaterally. For real.
Sweet fancy Moses! Then come the gifs, interspersed among lines such as
3. The problem is that when our immigration laws aren't enforced, it encourages more illegal immigration and causes the system to implode. Not cool.
and
6. House Republicans have introduced a bill that prevents the President from unilaterally shutting down the enforcement of our immigration laws. It does so by allowing state and local governments to enforce federal immigration law.
Experience the full multi-media power of this colossal waste of your money by going here now.
At the risk of being "for real," it's worth fisking some of the main points in the least-convincing attempt to win over the kids with stupid old shit since Archie, Jughead, and Big Ethel started solving "weird mysteries" rather than chug milkshakes at Pop's Chok'lit Shoppe.
For starters, President Obama didn't turn off "enforcement of our immigration laws." In 2014, via executive order, he prioritized who gets deported first, choosing not to kick out illegals with kids who are U.S. citizens and who haven't broken any laws for five years (other than being here without papers).
Under Obama's new executive order, up to five million undocumented immigrants could gain work permits and an assurance they won't be removed. This group includes the parents of kids born in the United States as well as foreigners who have been here five years or more without getting into serious trouble….
Obama's argument is that since the federal government can't and won't expel everyone who is here without authorization, it should pass over those who pose no real threat and focus on the more objectionable ones—criminals and foreigners who return after being expelled.
U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement has the manpower and money to deport only about 4 percent of the foreigners who are not entitled to be here. It makes sense to focus those resources on the most worrisome ones.
The order has been put on hold while its legality works through the courts and he Supreme Court will rule on whether or not the policy is constitutional or not. There are good arguments on both sides of that issue but let's not get in the way of a more important point, one that's for-real enough that it should be made in all caps: BARACK OBAMA HAS DEPORTED MORE PEOPLE THAN ANY OTHER PRESIDENT! If you've ever wondered just how incredibly fact-challenged, if not just downright stupid, Republicans can be, consider the fact that they are managing to alienate Hispanics during the reign of a president who has kicked more Mexicans and other Spanish-speaking New Worlders out of the country than anyone else.
But, but, but…what about the "not cool" implosion of the immigration system when non-threatening illegals aren't summarily kicked out of the country? Does it encourage "more illegal immigration"? Yeah, no.
When Republicans—even fake Republicans such as Donald Trump, the odds-on favorite to become the GOP's presidential candidate, god what a fake Republican!—talk about illegals, they are talking about Mexicans, who make up about half of all illegals. Guess what? The number of illegal Mexicans in the United States peaked in 2007. In fact, we're seeing a net out-migration of Mexicans, illegal and otherwise, from the United States. Which means that if we do build that stupid, ineffective, and sure-to-fail wall, its main success might be in trapping Mexicans—sorry, disease-ridden rapists who are carry drugs and bring crime—in the good ol' U.S. of A.
And if you can't stand having to hit that extra, productivity-killing button at the ATM machine—you know, the one that asks you whether you want to proceed in American or Mexican—sit tight:
Barring truly massive shocks to the Mexican economy or political system, we are extremely unlikely to see another great wave of immigration for at least the next 20 year to 40 years. And that would only happen if Mexico reverses a half-century of declining fertility rates within the next few years.
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But let's not let anything get in the way of the latest and greatest conservatard policy proposals emanating from Bob Goodlatte, Donald Trump, Ted Cruz, and all the other sharp minds behind a party so attractive and principled that just 26 percent of Americans identify with it, right?
If you think it's a good idea to force local cops to start enforcing immigration laws, chew on this: In recent memory, it used to be conservatives who were opposed to unfunded mandates and Washington, D.C. just piling on rules and regulations. Now, in the wake of Brussels attacks, Cruz and others want local cops "to patrol and secure Muslim neighborhoods" here in the United States.
Maybe this is more improtant: Sanctuary cities, where local law enforcement pledges not to investigate people's immigration status absent a court order to specifically do so, are safer than comparably sized cities that do the work of ICE. It's not hard to figure out why: Locals are more likely to report crime and cooperate with the law if they're worried that they're going to get rounded up and deported every time they call 911 or rat out troublemakers.
For centuries, the United States of America has simultaneously been a country of immigrants and a place that scapegoats immigrants. Somewhere on this page is a turn-of-century cartoon showing Italians being delivered to our shores "direct from the slums of Europe daily." The first time I saw that image, I mistook the rats for Mexicans (one of them is sporting an Italian tri-color headband, which isn't so different than the Mexican flag's colors). Same shit, different century.
Except that we should know better by now. How stupid are we, that we fall for the same cooked-up rhetoric and phony fears over and over and over again? Obama has been a terrible president as far as I'm concerned. But among the reasons for that is his record number of deportations, not the fact that he figures we should deport violent illegals first and law-abiding immigrants with kids last. Mexicans and other illegals are not swarming to our shores; they're leaving America because our economy is lackluster. And making Officer Friendly also start doing the job of Border Patrol agents won't make us safer, it will just make it harder to solve local crimes.
I wish that Ted Cruz, Donald Trump, Bob Goodlatte, and all the other nativist hysterics out there would acknowledge basic reality every once in a while. And if that's a bridge too far, then at least in the case of Goodlatte, stop using tax dollars to post insultingly stupid and pathetic Buzzfeed-style arguments that are more full of shit than a GG Allin concert ever was.
Related video: "The GOP Is Wrong About Sanctuary Cities."
